Empirical Evidence of Socially-Engineered Attack Menace Among Undergraduate Smartphone Users in Selected Universities in Nigeria

Abstract

Smartphone proliferation today, have up-scaled user adoption of Internet-based processing activities. These include (not limited to) e-learning, e-commerce, mobile-banking and others –all aimed at better performance, service delivery at improved execution speed, greater portability, flexibility and accessibility ease. Thus, necessitating growth expansion in mobile-app development across varying platforms that are poised to help users accomplish processing tasks while harnessing the benefits of the technology. Conversely, these techs have also allowed users to be constantly besieged by threats and security breaches. In lieu of residence, sensitive and proprietary –users have become bothered with smartphone exposure to possible data loss and theft –if they are to further adopt these new paradigms. With doubt in their minds, trust levels in user adoption continues to reduce. We seek to investigate social-engineered threats and attacks amongst undergraduates in Nigerian Universities. Result shows that phishing hits a higher successrate against smartphone users in Nigeria, which has decreased client’s trust level in Internet-based services

Assessing contributor features to phishing susceptibility amongst students of petroleum resources varsity in Nigeria

“…Phishing is an identity theft targeted at compromising sensitive unsuspecting victim's data often for personal gains [18]. Phishing can involve the creation of compromised websites, the acquisition of email lists and botnets, and spoofing of mails, SMS designed to deceive an unsuspecting victim into downloading the malicious contents therein as originating from a legitimate and trustworthy source(s) [5], [8]. A phishing attack has three (3) elements: a lure, hook and catch.…”

“…It has been observed that another feature that influences susceptibility to phish attacks is gender, age as well as online presence pattern. Users between the ages of 18 and 29 were identified as being the most susceptible to phishing attacks on both email and social media platforms [8], [39]; while females between the Int J Elec & Comp Eng ISSN: 2088-8708  ages of 24 to 42 were identified as being the most vulnerable to phishing attacks. This can be attributed to the fact that these young adults and females are constantly engaged to boycott social seclusion-leading to addiction [40].…”

“…These statistics highlight that the threat of phishing shows no sign of retreating. The gain therein a system to be exploited provides an adversary with an attractive entry point to a potentially compromised network as well as provides a pilot/pivot point for attack propagation [8].…”

“…Spams are deployed as attacks to target high-volume, low-value victims because they are relatively easy to distribute and do not require advanced expertise [11]. Spams are misunderstood as insignificant-even when they have shown an estimated daily volume of over 422 billion in January 2018 [12] and about 612 billion in January 2021 [8]. This constitutes over 85% of daily global data traffic a distribution eased by spammers who are capable of sending tons of messages via botnets in seconds to recipient's databank that are potentially vulnerable due to ineffective antivirus and other countermeasures [11].…”